Great Lakes College (Canadian High School) Update
Seems like I prematurely made a statement about Great Lakes College's reputation. I stand corrected by this news article. This was reported in one of the local papers. This article also underscores the social context of desparate international students and what they are willing to do:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1135378223430
Secret life: Visa student's downfall
Sensational cases highlight problem. Crimes prompt task force in China
Dec. 24, 2005. 01:00 AM
MARTIN REGG COHN AND KAREN MAZURKEWICH
TORONTO STAR
Suo Fengshuan sits beside a family picture showing his son Suo Zhiyang with his parents. He is now in a Canadian jail for the death of a Toronto school owner, a crime to which he pleaded guilty in 2002 at the age of 20.
SHANGQIU, China—For the Chinese, it is glorious to study. And more glamorous still to study abroad.
So when a teenaged student like Suo Zhiyang leaves his homeland for schooling in Canada, friends and neighbours picture him with all the advantages of life overseas. Destined for success.
Not languishing in a Canadian prison cell.
News travels slowly in this provincial backwater, 600 kilometres south of Beijing.
Three years after Suo pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the kidnapping of his Toronto schoolmaster, most of his relatives and acquaintances here have yet to hear of his sudden downfall.
They fully expect him to return next year with a degree under his arm, poised to take over the family business.
After all, Suo did what many rich students with poor grades do: He paid big money to revive his fortunes in Canada.
"It was difficult for him to get into a top university in China," explains his father, Suo Fengshuan. "If you go to a regular university here, it's hard to get a good job."
At first, the family thought their investment was paying off. It took a long time before they learned the truth of Suo's arrest for murder.
"He's a very good boy and he tried not to worry us," the father says mournfully. "He kept saying everything was fine, his studies were going smoothly."
Suo's fate remains a dark secret in this grimy coal-mining city, where his father is a prominent military man and his mother a well-connected entrepreneur. But as more than 110,000 Chinese students flock to schools in Canada and other Western countries every year, his is becoming an all too frequent story.
Two high-profile kidnappings in the Toronto area have shone a harsh spotlight on the roughly 10,000 Chinese students who come to Canada annually: The sensational kidnapping and murder of Cecilia Zhang, for which 22-year-old visa student Min Chen goes to trial next year; and the abduction of school owner Thomas Ku, 48, for which Suo pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2002 at age 20.
These are not isolated episodes. In the past five years, more than two dozen brutal incidents involving Chinese visa students have made international headlines: Two Chinese classmates repeatedly stabbed last year; a family of four slain in Japan; several women killed in New Zealand love triangles; a lover strangled in Chicago; students kidnapped and murdered in Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver.
The broad pattern of violent crime, stalking, extortion, fraud and theft among overseas Chinese students has prompted government officials and education experts in China to set up task forces to investigate the issue, says Yuan Tiecheng, who has written two books on the plight of Chinese visa students.
To be sure, the vast majority of Chinese students are law-abiding. So how do some Chinese students from a country with a relatively low crime rate come to a country like Canada, with a similarly low crime rate, and become criminals?
Many parents and Chinese government officials blame unscrupulous private agencies in China that charge extortionate fees to help secure visas for private schools abroad with questionable credentials.
In fact, China's ministry of education is raising alarm bells about the perils of foreign studies.
Its most recent public warnings single out certain private Canadian schools to be avoided because they "cheat Chinese students," adding that the authorities have "received many such complaints from Chinese students."
Specialists attribute the eruption of violent crime to China's rapid opening up to the West, the rise of a nouveau riche class that values status over scholarship, and the decline of discipline.
They also cite the fallout from China's one-child policy, which has spawned a generation of spoiled "Little Emperors," who are infantilized by overprotective parents yet unable to fend for themselves in a foreign environment.
"In China, everything is arranged by the parents. There is no freedom, from the school gate to the house door," says Yuan, a senior journalist at the China Youth Daily. "When they go abroad, they have a strong sense of entitlement that they can do anything."
Shen Yongqiang, an educational psychology professor at Shanghai Normal University, also believes the younger age of the students leaves them poorly prepared for culture shock.
"Now the young generation just spends their parents' money," he says. "They're too young, they lack life experience, lack judgment and lack the self-discipline to control their impulses."
Duped by private agencies, drawn into drugs or gambling, depressed by failed romances, they run out of money — or hope — and grow desperate.
"To get money, they will do anything and that's when all the horrible stories start to happen," Shen believes. "They're very self-centred and always act on their own desires and needs."
But the growing recognition of the problem comes too late for Suo's parents, who were swelling with pride when their son left the police academy here for a promising future in Canada. Now, they speak in hushed tones about his downfall — and their private humiliation.
They don't blame their son. They blame the system.
"There are too many liars and cheaters in the world who have no mercy — they just want as much money as possible, while risking your child's life," says Suo Fengshuan, 49, beside a family portrait showing his jailed son in happier times.
Like so many other young Chinese who go abroad, Suo Zhiyang's fate was entrusted to a local agency that promised the world: For a fee the family could count on easy admissions, work permits and guaranteed immigrant status for their son, according to the sales pitch.
The couple signed up with the local Li Bo School and its affiliated private agency, which assured them they could send their son to Canada for a mere 150,000 yuan, or about $22,000. It was a lowball estimate by the agency, which went bankrupt soon after pocketing the fees.
The family ended up paying $100,000 for the son's education, stashing wads of cash into secret money belts to evade customs controls, according to the father.
But within months of his arrival, the young Suo was bitterly disappointed by conditions at his school, overwhelmed by the language barrier. He failed his exams, floundered in his social life, fell in with the wrong crowd.
And kidnapped Ku, the owner of Great Lakes College, for a $100,000 ransom in a plot hatched with a classmate.
Two years after arriving in Canada, Suo and his co-conspirator appeared in court with their hair tied in ponytails, admitting they had bound and gagged Ku in the trunk of a car and dumped him in the woods, burned beyond recognition.
"I can never make any excuse," Suo said at his sentencing in a Brampton courtroom.
"This is the most significant mistake of my life."
But there was no mistaking the motive, according to his mother, Feng Meizhi.
Sitting in a private room at her Guo Guo Mutton Soup restaurant, which she opened here earlier this year in China's central Henan province, Feng says she came to understand her son's actions after visiting him.
"My son told me they wanted to teach him (Ku) a lesson, to warn him not to cheat Chinese students anymore," she confides, waiting until the waitresses have moved out of earshot.
"He said Ku was too greedy and treated the Chinese students badly," she adds.
She remembers her son referring to Great Lakes College as a "garbage school," the term used by Chinese students for private institutions with disproportionately high enrolments of foreign students paying high fees.
Tuition at Great Lakes ran as high as $10,000 a year for high school and English-immersion courses, plus residence fees of $6,000, excluding meals.
The school's main Keele St. campus now has about 80 students, but its satellite Bowmanville location has been converted to a summer camp for foreign high school students, according to the school's new principal, Dong Folz. International students still pay more than $1,000 per course each semester.
"My son was really upset when he first saw the school and complained a lot about the owner," she says.
"It was not like he imagined, and all his classmates complained that the owner was greedy and overcharging."
Despite the negative publicity, Chinese consultants and some of Canada's most established schools are lining up to get a piece of a booming market.
Indeed, Premier Dalton McGuinty included a large education delegation on a trade mission to China last month. "We continue to see a strong, healthy opportunity for Chinese students to study in Canada," said Ian Burchett, spokesperson for the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. "It's a very important market for us."
An estimated 35,000 Chinese are in Canada on education visas at any one time, including those admitted in previous years, Burchett added. Tuition fees range from $10,000 to $12,000 a year, not including room and board, plus agency fees.
But while there is money to be made, there is also a price to be paid: Much of the growth comes from the increased number of inexperienced teenagers being sent abroad. "Ten years ago, the only people going abroad were probably graduate students," Burchett acknowledges. Now, "a lot of people are going for Grades 11 and 12."
Roughly two-thirds of Chinese visa students are now under the age of 18, according to Yang Xiong, director of the Youth Research Institute at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Joshua Gu, who helps clients gain admission to Canadian schools from his office at Edu Shanghai International Co. Ltd., decries the increase in teenaged students attending foreign high schools, where they are especially vulnerable to adjustment problems.
"We don't recommend to high school students that they go to Canada," says Gu. "They lack the social and survival skills."
He is critical of unscrupulous agencies, but also blames parents for expecting foreign schools to give their children a second chance when they score poorly on China's university entrance exams.
"If they can't do well in China, why would they do well in Canada?" he asks. The answer is that all too often, "going to Canada is a question of pride."
Pride and pathos. For the Suo family, there is only a profound loss of face and a soul-destroying cover-up.
Now, the parents who saved and scrimped and wheeled and dealed to give their son a better life are at wits' end.
The father, who risked his life daily as a military firefighter to save the lives of others now lives with the knowledge that his son took the life of an innocent man.
The mother, who profited from her husband's connections to build a successful business has been reduced to making up stories about her son's continuing studies in Canada.
When neighbours and cousins ask how those studies are going, the parents discreetly change the subject.
Almost everyone here is oblivious to Suo's fate.
Still, motherly pride is powerful, and in private, she is not beyond boasting about her son's achievements behind bars: Thanks to his years in prison, Suo's conversational English is now much better than it was at school.
Despite the hard times, she can't help but be pleased by his progress abroad — albeit belatedly.
"He's teaching English and math courses in jail," she says.
"Canada is great."
posted by Q-Buster at 1:12 AM
6 Comments:
Thank you for your critique, which I consider to be constructive.
My area of knowledge is in post-secondary education. My knowledge of the high schools that Jessie attended came through very brief discussions with people in the area of university admissions, which has flagged Dominion College as a suspicious high school. They listed Great Lakes College as a reputable high school, which I reported here.
In the interest of an open and transparent blog, I want to make sure that all information is brought to the surface so that the bigger context is available to form an opinion. The strength of an opinion rises from information, facts and knowledge.
This new report of Great Lakes College only having 80 students (that's 2-3 classes - so you can imagine how many teachers they have), their satellite campus only functioning as a summer make-up school, and the complains of the students cast a new light on the reported good reputation, and must be brought up here.
And instead of just stating that second hand, I decided to have the entire article reproduced and have people read and pick out the information.
That's both responsible journalism and objective research. This article is relevant, trust me. There are tons of legitimate high schools both operated by governments and academics that she could have attended. Why a private high school that was busted for selling credits, and another that students complained bitterly about that two were willing to cross over the line? This is part of a bigger pattern don't you think?
Welcome nightline, btw ... and all opinions are welcomed.
Emergency medical aid - that's a good benchmark to use.
I was once flying across the Atlantic and the captain came over the PA system asking for a doctor to identify himself as a child was very sick on board. Some stupid professor with a PhD (in the arts) self-identified himself as a doctor. It was such a joke.
Finally a paramedic offered her help, with the aid of telemedicine. The plane had some medical kids, and between the paramedic and the airline's doctor at the call centre, they helped the child.
Back to the point. I was trying to establish some patterns, about both deceptions and intelligence. From my observations, there is a very strong co-relationship between students who did not master the basic fundamentals or have poor studies attitude while in high school, and eventual performance in university.
In Jessie's case, her very first bachelor's degree was already questionable at the get go. Why would any famous medical practitioner such as Jessie(I understand she is very sought after in Malaysia) need to go to an unaccredited university? And attend these kind of high schools - there are plenty of good public high schools and better private high schools in Canada. In fact, good North American high schools and universities are plentiful to choose from.
every physician has the complete knowledge, to act in emergencies, He (or She) is the wise man (or woman) that sould attend the patient.
The paramedic is a quack who thinks itself is a doctor. Paramedics exist because the government, assumes that their services are cheaper to hire real doctors. Inside other countries, and in past times, the doctors also works into the ambulances attending emergencies on field. Remember, in the ancient Rome, and since the French revolution, the physicians created the ambulances by adapting carriages with surgical instruments and drugs.
/Thanks to his years in prison, Suo's conversational English is now much better than it was at school./
This is just so tragicomical.
I'm not saying it's EVER okay to kidnap someone. If the Principal was really a scammer they should have taken it to the civil court, taken it to the press. It was right for them to serve time for manslaughter, but compared to Min Chen, the murderer of Cecilia Zhang, I have more sympathy for these two.
Min Chen wasn't from some desperate backwaters village, he was from Shanghai, he should have known better to then to endanger a kid with kidnapping, he should have known better than to cover her mom, he should have had human decency to let the police find the body before it was just bones so the parents could say good buy. Further more, the advance decay of Zhang's body made it impossible to verify Min's story of accidental killing - he could have been a pervert and we'll never know for sure.
I'm nervous because I will be taking a class at Seneca soon, where there are lots of these Chinese Visa Students. I feel silly about this nervousness because I used to live in the same neighbourhood as Paul Bernado!
I was a graduate of Great Lakes College and while I have no idea the state of the school today, I can testify that it was once a credible place of serious learning. The student population was about four to five hundred each semester.Many of the students were accepted and graduated from good universities. My cohorts obtained degrees from Queens, U of T, UWO, McMaster, just to mention a few. But that was when the school was under a different management. I think the later owners of the school probably had a different vision for their investment. All I know was that there were practically no students from mainland China then. If you have the access, you will be able to discover that sometime during the 90's, the entire teaching staff was replaced and legal action was filed against the school for unfair employment acts.
That last comment is true. I was a teacher at Great Lakes (Miss MacDonald) under the original management. The founders were an investment club of middle-aged Nanyang University graduates who were then professors at Canadian universities. They did have a genuine interest in education. But they sold the school, and the new owners were not of the same type. And yes, all the teachers left.
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